Justyn Leveret
Instructor Wenzel
ENC 2135
25 July 2019
Students and Competitive Gaming
My research consisted of looking for any information I could find on competitive gaming and college students. At first, I was looking for information on college students, as for my community is Esports at FSU. Upon searching for more information, I found that even high-school students are joining into the world of Esports and competing for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Learning about the ways that these teens are using their skills on games to make a living led me to my question. My question is, what do competitive gamers obtain psychologically from playing at higher levels? My goal is to find out the benefits of playing competitively and to see what positive impacts playing may have on an individual, specifically students. Being a college student, I want to know the effects of fully indulging into competitive gaming. After setting up a meeting with the head of FSU Esports, Jacob, he told me we would be meeting at the practice location for a few of the competitive teams. Here at FSU the main hub for gaming is known as the Askew Student Life Center, and this is where the interview took place.
The Askew Student Life Center, at FSU, is home to many gaming computers used by students and Esport athletes. The building is big and contains many tables, chairs, and booths for studying and collaborating. This is the space on campus in which a few of the teams from FSU Esports practice. On the day I stopped by, the Overwatch team (Overwatch is a competitive game with a professional league) was practicing on the computers, and it was cool to say the least. This place is a sanctuary for gamers and gives students a platform to perform on. Other than the Askew Center, the players from the FSU Esports teams can practice online from the comfort of their apartments or dorms. Jake, the founder of Esports here at FSU, told me that a few other teams like League of Legends and Rocket League also practice in the Askew Center, but for some gamers and some games the computers there are just a little too slow.
Jacob Ford was one of the three founders of the Esports community here on campus, and he is who I interviewed. One major statistic that stuck with me ever since he and I talked is, “Competitive Esports is a $1,000,000,000 industry growing by 60% per year” (Ford). This to me shows that every school has a reason to get with Esports and to show the other schools what they have. My interest in the gaming world is Fortnite, and Kelvin Hamilton is responsible for starting the fortnite team here at FSU. The team falls under Esports here on campus and I plan on being a part of it this upcoming year. The way that the community communicates is through Discord, which is a chat room-based app found first on computers. There is now an app for discord making it easier than ever to check up on your chat rooms. Players can choose which game they want to receive information and updates from when it comes to FSU Esports. Last year, FSU fortnite competed in 3 tournaments. These tournaments were Dream Hack 2019, CSL, and AVGL. The club also has social media accounts where they update everyone on up and coming events. Jake told me that the plan for the group is to advertise a ton more, primarily on social media. Twitch is an app used for live-streaming video games, and FSU has their own channel. Anyone that is a part of the Esports at FSU community may use this streaming platform to their advantage by streaming on there. Jake was a great help overall and he helped me see the bigger picture for FSU Esports. The community could not have picked a more qualified individual to lead our community of gamers.
For many students, Video games are an escape from everyday problems. Students use gaming to hide from all the things in their life and to slip away for a while into one of the many worlds. However, for some students, gaming is both an escape and a ticket. A ticket for success and sometimes riches in life. According to Zalaznick, “Esports provides another vehicle to connect students with their school, culminating in our ultimate pleasure of success: graduation.” Zalaznick shows in his studies that the attendance rate for those who started competitive gaming rose to 94%, and the GPA of the students raised 1.5 points above the school average. These statistics show that students who begin to competitive game strive more in the classroom than they did before. Another study was conducted by Chun-Wang Wei, and his goal was to find out if competitive games could boost the learning of English vocabulary. His studies proved him to be right, and the abstract of their study states, “The results show that the integration of a competitive gaming scenario with a personalized assistance strategy helped students improve their vocabulary acquisition.” With research like this pointing toward an increase of school succession, who knows what competitive gaming will unlock for us in the future.
Another study has been conducted by Dennis Pierce of New Jersey. Pierce set out to take a closer look at the high-school team known as the Fair Haven Knights competitive gaming team. This team takes place in a middle school in New Jersey and is one of the very few middle school teams in the entire country. This group of trend setting individuals may contain some of the next faces in the world of gaming and they have proven to be diligent with schoolwork even while practicing every day together. Pierce writes, “They just went home and played video games. Now, they’re getting all the benefits of playing a sport – including the sense of belonging to a community.” The last part of this quote really ties what I have been saying together. Playing at this level, especially at a younger age, can greatly impact one’s social skills and sense of belonging. When you are wearing that jersey and you are grinding on a game with your teammates, you feel like you belong to something. This sense of community brings people together to create something amazing and this is one of the reasons our community was founded. There were gamers all around us and even a couple of teams for various games on campus, but there just wasn’t a platform for everyone to stand on together. On top of the sense of community, those from Pierce’s study were also reported to have increases in their GPA’s, attendance, and extracurricular activities.
Communication is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, aspects of competitive gaming. Without communication a team will fall apart and lose their specific game. This skill also happens to be prominent in every-day life, and gaming has proven itself to be one of the ways people can improve communication skills. Luke Breland of the University of Florida wrote, “cooperation and signaling threats to the immediate goals and interests of the team and individuals on the team, these types of utterances are typically called callouts by competitive and team-oriented players.” While using these skills every time we play video games, someone may develop a strong sense of communication and teamwork skills which could either transfer on to other people or be of great use in the workplace. Other than communication skills being raised, people have long sought after something bad to come out of gaming. The most common thing that people wonder about video games (specifically killing games) is, are students more violent after playing violent video games? And according to research done by Professor DeCamp in 2014 on 6,567 8th grade students, “violent video game play does not impact a student’s propensity for violence.” By playing violent video games, students must work with their teammates in order to survive. Without communicating and calling out they will die, and in every game you can think of the goal is to stay alive. This mentality of doing everything in your power to reach your goal (in gaming the goal is to win the game) is easily transferred over to real life and is a good characteristic to have. Without the drive to succeed and to complete all of one’s goals, being successful can become a major issue in life.
The research that has been done on my topics have proven gaming to be a positive way to pass time. With all the negative connotation that goes in and around gaming, it can be difficult to find research that proves gaming to be a positive entity. With diligent research I’ve found, I have proven that with FSU’s implementation of a competitive Esports scene they are making a very smart choice. Not only will students be able to come out of their shell through gaming (like most of them already have), but the students will be able to develop a sense of freedom and family. With an entire community of gamers behind your back, it is easy to feel loved and acknowledged by those around you. Jake and the other founders at FSU esports have done a great job at forming their community and creating the family vibe that goes in and around the community. I have been captivated with being involved ever since I met with Jake, and I am looking forward to my future with the group. He explained to me the ways that he runs the everyday activities with the group, and how much communication happens throughout the group every day. Knowing that a community full of gamers all interconnected in a chat room were right here on campus with me sparked a joy in my life that I haven’t felt in a while. Being a part of an online community is completely new to me and I would assume new to most of the members, so the thought of all being together in a chat group sounds astounding to me. The people involved with the community are on the discord (the communities form of text) day in and day out helping all the community members achieve what they desire. Growing and expanding every day the world of esports finds itself in a crazy ever changingever-changing world, and only those with desire grab onto it.
One way of managing this ever-changing world is through discord, The way that the community communicates is through Discord, which is a chat room-based app found first as a computer application. Prior to meeting with Jake, I knew what discord was, but had not use it much. The application is composed of chat rooms that are either private, meaning that they require an invite, or open to join. The rooms are then broken down into sub-sections within the chat room itself. These sections are usually designated for certain things or services within the group and sometimes have moderators in control of them. This means that someone’s “job” as a moderator is to sit and look over their section of the chat room and make sure all is well with it. This could mean looking for bad language or harassment, or simply helping those who send questions that they may have. There is now a mobile app for discord making it easier than ever to check up on your chat rooms. Personally, I use the mobile application to keep up with my friends and various chat rooms I am in, including the FSU Esports chat. After my interview with Jake, one of the founders of the community, I found out that discord is the one and only form of text for the community. He said that shortly after the creation of Esports at FSU, they created the discord group for all the community’s members to join and talk through. All information and planning are done through the discord, and everyone keeps in touch this way. In FSU Esport’s discord there are around thirty subsections. Most of these sections are for information on each specific game. For each game’s subsection, the team captain is the moderator and oversees all posts in their section. Players can choose which game they want to receive information and updates from when it comes to FSU Esports by enabling notifications for games they play or participate in. With this in effect it makes it easy on all the members of the discord to receive the information they wish to. For example, if a player does not play Apex Legends and instead, they play Fortnite, that player can disable all notifications about Apex Legends since they would never participate with that portion of the community. There are some members of the Esports community that play multiple games, however most players tend to focus all their energy on one game to become the best that they possibly can.
With discord in place it makes it easy on the leaders of FSU Esports to reach out to all its members. Rather than sending out an email and waiting on responses or using basic social media posts, Jake and his team can easily reach out to their entire community with one message. With a feature on discord the leaders of the chat can send push notifications to everyone and with the mobile application you receive the notification instantly. Each week Jake sends out a schedule for up and coming events for all to participate in. These events are played on a wide variety of games, and mostly consist of practices. For example, during the week of July 22nd through July 28th 2019, the games on the weekly practice schedule consisted of Rocket League, League of Legends, Counter Strike, and Fortnite. These “practices” are open for all FSU Esports members to participate in. Becoming a member of the community is as easy as joining the discord. The discord is open to join and can be found on FSU Esports portion of the FSU communities page. Jake (one of FSU Esports co-founders) explained to me that these events are a great way for newcomers to get to know their games community within FSU Esports. By playing in the practices you are putting yourself in front of the individuals that will be selecting the teams. The team managers can get a feel for your play style and can easily place you into a skill category. During the time that I have been here for summer there have only been practices on the weekly schedules. The teams and tournaments begin to pick up in the fall, so for now the community’s main goal is to get as many people involved in practices and into the discord as possible. Jake said he is working on acquiring sponsorships for the community to obtain more supplies and technology. He said that the more that we use discord and establish ourselves as an official community, the more sponsors will be interested in us. With the increase in popularity in gaming recently, FSU Esports is in the middle of the trend and is ready for all there is to come. Discord has always been used by gamers specifically, due to the party chat ability. This feature allows computer gamers specifically to talk with their friends while they play, no matter what game each person is on.
A genre in my community is entertainment, and when it comes to gaming livestreaming is the biggest form of entertainment next to YouTube videos. Livestreaming video games is done on a site named Twitch. On this site you can livestream any video game and it is open for the world to view. This is the primary way that gamers turn their passion into their career through donations and subscriptions on the site. Viewing a stream is free, but you can choose to subscribe to the streamer, giving them about five dollars a month. The reason I mention twitch is because FSU Esports have their own twitch channel that is open for all members of the community to stream on. This provides all players in FSU Esports a platform to show off their skills on and to show off their entertaining side. Using the schools twitch account to stream not only publicizes yourself as an entertainer but it gives the community publicity also. Jake and his team strongly encourage for all of us to use the twitch account to our advantage as everyone benefits from us streaming on there. With fall coming soon FSU Esports plans to host their own events and to go participate in others. These events will be livestreamed to twitch and can publicly be viewed by anyone who chooses to tune in.
The argument I am trying to make about my community is that it is far more complex and beneficial to one’s life than the public eye likes to believe. With this community at FSU, students who are antisocial or may suffer from nervousness of new things such as social anxiety, may all come together and channel their energy through games like they always had. Kids who have played games passively just for fun now have an opportunity to perform at a higher level of gaming and to be a part of a community of gamers. With the wide selection of games to participate in, students can easily find their favorite game and join their own personal community. Just like the research found, I believe that students who participate in competitive gaming here will also exhibit higher grades than those of the students around us. The dedication needed to participate on a professional competitive team is unmatched when compared to a regular student. This dedication and time required forces students to work hard in school to allow them ample amounts of time to practice their game. Growing up I have always played video games, specifically shooters. Now I play Fortnite, a game in which a sixteen-year-old won three million dollars playing in a tournament recently. The tournament was the Fortnite world cup, and this is a prime example of the multitude of events that go on in Esports every year. This fact alone, knowing that plenty of kids my age and younger are making more money than most parents, inspires me to be a professional gamer. I plan on fully indulging myself into this community even after the completion of this writing course, as for I wish to excel in the world of gaming and to get my name out there.